Anglo-Indian Women

Abstract

Ethnicity is not a product of common living but is a product of self-aware belonging to a particular group as distinct from others. Ethnic identity primarily distinguishes a person in terms of her/his origin or background. One of the fundamental facets of Anglo-Indians’ social identity is their identification with and preference for their own ethnic group. There is of course no crucial contradiction in identifying with one’s group. But for an ethnic group like the Anglo-Indians the situation is different because it is compounded by the fact that the community lives in subordination to the majority group. Furthermore, not all Anglo-Indians prefer to identify with their own group. A few of them actually internalize the ideas other communities have about them and prefer non-Anglo-Indians to their own kind. Ethnicity often overlaps with the dimensions of minority-group status. Ethnicity in that case is correlated with assumed social discrimination and deviance through a process of labelling. Kinloch therefore suggests that ethnicity is inherent in minority groups as well. Ethnic minorities are defined as culturally inferior with regard to physical, intellectual and behavioural traits and therefore have limited access to occupational options. These groups are economically dependent and their cultural differences are more emphasized than their physical differences in a racially homogeneous situation. Feminist sociologists see patriarchy as a social product and not as an outcome of innate and natural differences between the sexes. They focus on the constructed-ness of gender roles and how such constructed gender roles affect societal power differentials between men and women. The patriarchal plurality is a facet of Indian social life. It produces social disparity and is characterized by a network of overlaps and differences as well as a field of interaction. But it is important to state that women who are united on the bases of systemic and overlapping patriarchies are nevertheless simultaneously divided along other lines. Three such divisions are predominant: first, class structures and the accompanying power to oppress women and men of other classes; second, consent to a patriarchal structure and its compensatory structure and the accompanying power delegated to oppress women of other communities or patriarchies; and, third, the values and ideologies of the ‘other’ as opposed to ‘us’. Each of these divisions can by themselves produce equally significant divisions among women. In this regard, affiliation to a community identity can make a difference to women but need not produce a conflict between them. It is only when this difference is translated into politics and is aligned with institutions that maintain forms of power that it has the capacity to divide women. This diversity is partly a product of discrete ideological systems. However, these are continuously subjected to restructuring in the domain of customs and by class imperatives. The separateness of these patriarchies is in fact partly due to an ideological effect. But even in areas of striking differences there is similarity. Like the women of any community and culture, Anglo-Indian women live within the patriarchal structure of their community, but what makes them different from others is that they face multiple layers of patriarchal domination: one within their own community and the other from the outer world. In this case, the demands and expectations of the multiple patriarchal structures faced by Anglo-Indian women intersect and overlap at points but have distinct qualities as well. The multiple structures are analytically distinct but in reality may be confronted as a single patriarchal structure by the subject. The women of the community are subject to all the layers of patriarchal domination at the same time, and their responses to all these layers are different. For example, they may mutely accept the patriarchal structure of their community, on the one hand; but on the other, they may harbour cynical reservations about the patriarchal structures of the outer world (in this case, India). All these patriarchies reinforce masculinity and reproduce gendered power relations where the women may act as agents of patriarchal demands on other women. The word tash, often used as slang for Indian Christians and especially Anglo-Indians, is another example of the disdain other Indians have for Anglo-Indian women. This word has a deeper connotation in Bengali language with reference to Sukumar Roy’s poem about of a cow that was a tash. It cynically symbolized how Anglo-Indians, though born and brought up in India, looked up appreciatively to anything that was European. Instead of eating grass as cows usually do, the tash goru craved candles and soups made of soap water. The cow is a Eurasian clerk in ill-fitting Western clothes who is represented as having a weak constitution and possessing low-class values and easy virtue. Since it was Anglo-Indian women who served predominantly as clerks, the poem goes to show how Anglo-Indian women were (and still are) imagined as lower class and unacceptable in public. They were despised by the broader Indian society, which upheld the moral virtues of satitva (chastity) and matritva (motherhood) and celebrated the ethicized femininity of the pativrata (devoted wife) and sati-savitri (a chaste wife of mythological sanctity). Bengali middle-class women before independence seldom ventured out unless forced to by financial crisis or, in rare cases, when they were educated and desired independence. Though the situation at present has changed for Bengali women, it has remained quite the same for their Anglo-Indian counterparts. They are still yoked to the responsibility of the family and are not free to follow their own goals. Moreover, the presence of the Anglo-Indian girl in the public domain was anathema to the Bengali middle-class conservative sensibilities right up until the twentieth century. The two incompatible modes of social orientation deepened the differences between Bengali and the Anglo-Indian woman. The dual patriarchy of Hindu brahminical provenance, on the one hand, and of Anglo-Indian provenance, on the other, bore down on Anglo-Indian women simultaneously. The brahminical patriarchy of the Hindu-Bengalis eschewed everything mlechha (European) or which did not conform to Hindu prescriptions. Therefore, the Europeanized Anglo-Indian lifestyle and especially the way the women of the community behaved were against the patriarchal norms of the Hindus. This is not to suggest that only Anglo-Indian men have cultural features distinct from that of their women. Anglo-Indian women are distinct from the women of other communities in India in their dress, language, employment status and other cultural markers such as their affinity towards their schools among other preferences. But what makes them distinct from the men of the community is the multiple patriarchies they face. However, the quantum of Hindu aggression faced by Anglo-Indian women is not necessarily greater than that faced by Anglo-Indian men. What is crucial here is the how the Anglo-Indian woman has been subjected to multiple layers of patriarchal domination within her community. She faces the non-Anglo-Indian man as a male with his universal masculine expectations and additionally as a member of a different community expressing a set of patriarchal expectations different from those of her own community. These women are already marginal as members of an ethnic minority group—the Anglo-Indians. Yet their subjection to the multiple patriarchies marginalizes them further even within their own community—that is, they are a minority among the minority group of Anglo-Indians. They are doubly marginal, doubly minoritised. Their response to society is framed within this multiple-patriarchal setup. Therefore any study of the responses of two generations of Anglo-Indian women living in Kolkata should pay heed to these layers of patriarchies. Methodology of the StudyThe methodology of the study is based on a feminist methodological orientation. Methods of social research are based on research methodologies and research epistemologies. Feminist ethnography began when the optimism of writing about categories like voice and class of ‘other women’ was beginning to break down. Feminist scholars realized that there was an element of power between the women of the colonizer and women of the colonized societies. This implied that cultural interpretation is power-laden and involves more than translations or brokering and that sisterhood cannot be assumed. It presumed that to confront the ‘subaltern’ is not to represent it, but to learn to ‘represent ourselves’ and come to know how encounters are engendered by relations of power. The postmodern feminist ethnography at present confronts the ‘contaminated’, the ‘promiscuous’ and the ‘impure’. The technique employed in collecting this data is semi-structured face-to-face interviews. It involves one-on-one in-depth interviews in which respondents are questioned at length about particular issues and experiences. It is a realist approach where the responses are treated as answers describing some external facts or internal experiences. The research objects were encouraged to talk about the issues in the interview schedule and the research subject tried to maximize her understanding of the research object’s point of view. The ‘informal’ (the researcher was not known to the research object prior to the interview, but intimacy developed while the interviewee talked about personal experiences) conversational process provided a scope for the research subject to understand what meanings the research objects assigned to some issues, events and experiences. Significant latitude was given to the respondents (research objects) in shaping the interview using their own frame of reference and concepts. This was extremely important because the research subject and the research object had different domains of understanding of the meanings of certain actions and behaviour. The respondents were also encouraged to give examples to ground their narratives. Snowball sampling was the method of selection used here. With snowball sampling the researcher typically builds up a network of respondents through an initial group of informants who introduce the researcher to the other members of their group. They again act as additional informants who introduce the researcher to other potential respondents. This sampling method is often used to reach respondents that are difficult to contact.